Micropoetry Month: Nov 2017: #8

The last time I tried my version of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” I called it “ Thirteen Ways of Looking in the Mirror” . Think I need to change my perspective!

Try your own set of thirteen (or three or ten) or share any other form of micropoetry using comments or Mister Linky! Here’s mine.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Myself

(1)

my silence
is the space
I concede to you,
sometimes
willingly

(2)

as a fragment of a fragment
of a fragment…
should I worry
that I am incomplete

(3)

whatever you see
when you see me,
know that inside
I am polished mirror

(4)

my anger has a way
of finding hidden words
while pain sits in the dark
reading someone else’s poems

(5)

what I know about love
I learnt from the river
that polishes one stone
into a glowing pebble
and lets another survive

(6)

I was once a chinar leaf
that fell, sunset soaked,
to the rhythm
of fading footsteps…
matter to matter

(7)

the space I occupy
is the space that separates earth from sky
like an unkindness

(8)

I am a grieving
widow, ashen draped,
mourning a rain
that never fell

(9)

this I know-
my shadow also believes
I am just a trick
of the morning light

(10)

I make lists on parchment
of things the world won’t give me-
in return for things
I won’t give the world

(11)

does rough wool
want to be fine muslin?
does my swirling mind
want to be Rumi’s song?

(12)

louder than any
silence I know
is the whisper of stones
in an abandoned temple

(13)

simultaneously
perpetrator and victim,
I judge myself
from the sidelines